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Trump’s Unconstitutional, Presidential War Against Yemen – Antiwar.com, Ted Galen Carpenter
For Americans who still think that Donald Trump is an advocate of realism and restraint in foreign policy, the events in Yemen should come as a rude awakening. Unfortunately, the most prominent indicator enabled the president’s political opponents to evade their own share of the blame for the tragic events in that country. Revelations that members of Trump’s national security team had conducted a discussion of highly classified information about war plans in Yemen over an insecure system exploded in the news media last month. One official, apparently National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, had even inadvertently invited Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic, to join the chat. The resulting “Signalgate” scandal dominated the news cycle for the next two weeks.
The dominant focus of most news stories about the episode was both revealing and depressing. Critics vehemently denounced the Trump team for an egregious inability to keep the Yemen war plans secret. Few journalists or members of Congress condemned the participants in the chat for planning an unconstitutional war. There was no hint that President Trump planned to seek a formal declaration of war as required by the Constitution. Instead, the principal officials intend to continue the illegal practice of waging presidential wars that has become the norm since the end of World War II.
Indeed, a new phase of the conflict with Yemen was already well underway. Vice President J. D. Vance boasted to the other participants in the chat that U.S. forces had located a “terrorist leader” (i.e. a high-level military official of Yemen’s Houthi rebel government) and would be taking him out. Indeed, the U.S. launched an air and missile attack on the apartment complex where the official was visiting his girlfriend. The collateral damage included the collapse of the building along with extensive casualties. Notably, very few administration critics bothered to criticize the Trump foreign policy team for such conduct.
Matters have grown worse since that episode. On April 17, U.S. forces conducted an even larger assault on a civilian port in Yemen. This time, more than 80 people, mostly civilians, perished. And once again, there was silence from critics who have denounced the Trump administration for everything from the ill-treatment of immigrants, to harassment of law firms linked to the Democratic Party, to the White House’s efforts to downsize the federal bureaucracy.
Bipartisanship about waging brutal, unconstitutional wars, though, apparently remains thoroughly intact. Given the long history of pro-war views on Yemen in both parties, one should not be especially surprised that there would be no meaningful dissent regarding Washington’s current belligerence toward that country. When Saudi Arabia first intervened in Yemen’s simmering civil war in 2015, Barack Obama’s administration gave full backing to its ally and the coalition that Riyadh led. Washington supplied weapons to the Saudi-led forces, shared military intelligence with those forces, and helped to refuel coalition warplanes. Most of that support continued through both Trump’s first term and Biden’s presidency.
The U.S. meddling helped produce one of the worst tragedies in the perennially troubled Middle East. In the years that followed during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, the people of Yemen suffered from famine, a cholera epidemic, and the chronic infliction of military casualties. Even when the fighting subsided from time to time, the respites were relatively brief. Before Trump took office for his second term in 2021, the Biden administration had launched a new wave of attacks on Houthi targets because the Yemini regime condemned Israel for its war crimes in Gaza and harassed Western shipping passing through the Red Sea.
The Trump administration’s decision to reignite full-scale warfare in Yemen is horrifying and immoral. To do so without a declaration of war is also unconstitutional. For administration critics to condemn officials for insufficient skill in concealing such illegal and immoral conduct but not to denounce the conduct itself is disgraceful.
And related:
Waking Up From The Nightmare Of Western Civilization
We’ll sit on the edge of our seats watching made-up tales about psychopathic killers while psychopathic killers rule the world.
We don’t need horror movies. We’re creating our own horrors in places like Gaza.
We don’t need dystopian fiction. We’re living in dystopia right here in our own society.
We don’t need fantasy stories about scary monsters. The scary monsters run our government.
Westerners will create a waking nightmare, psychologically compartmentalize away from its existence, and then go watch a movie about a fictional waking nightmare to give themselves a thrill.
We’ll sit on the edge of our seats watching made-up tales about psychopathic killers while psychopathic killers rule the world.
We’ll turn our backs on horrific acts of human butchery and then go watch fictional acts of human butchery, getting ourselves through any discomfort we might experience by reminding ourselves that what we are watching isn’t happening in real life.
Someone in my Substack comments just asked me if I’d considered the possibility that the world might be better off without humanity, because of all the horrible things that are happening while the vast majority of us do nothing to stop it.
There are certainly many ugly things about human behavior, and there are forces within us which absolutely do not deserve to exist. Our self-centeredness. Our competitiveness. Our hatred and prejudice. Our seemingly limitless tolerance for unfathomable abuses so long as they are being inflicted on people in other countries whose anguished faces we don’t have to look at. The delusions and trauma-based conditioning patterns we’ve been passing on from generation to generation since the dawn of civilization. The world would be better off without these things.
But over the years I have also become acquainted with dynamics inside the human organism which could make this world into a paradise, if we can only get out from underneath our delusion-based conditioning enough to realize them. Within every human being sleeps the potential for selfless action and vast compassion. We all have within us the ability to heal. We all have within us the ability to shed egoic consciousness like a reptile sheds old scales.
Maybe it’s silly, but I like to think of this potentiality as a kind of Chekhov’s gun for our species, sitting there onstage waiting to go off as humanity’s story unfolds. I know for a fact that humans have the potential to awaken from the trance of the ego in profoundly transformative ways, and I choose to believe that the playwright put that potential there for a reason.
Every species eventually hits a point where it must adapt to changing conditions which threaten its existence or go extinct. It just happens that in humanity’s case, the changing conditions which threaten our existence are the creations of our own minds. Ecocide. Nuclear brinkmanship. Weaponized AI. Biological warfare. The further our egos carry us down the path of competition and domination, the more likely it is that we open up some existential peril down the road for ourselves that there is no coming back from.
We’ll either make the necessary adaptations and find a way to collectively unlock our dormant potential for selfless functioning on this planet, or we will go the way of the dinosaur. I keep at this because I have seen far too many strange and miraculous things in my life to believe such an awakening is impossible.
And the good news is we have truth on our side. The human ego is an illusion; the self does not exist. Enlightenment is already here, closer to us than our own breath, just being overlooked amid the flailings of the deluded mind. The propaganda is deceitful, and the truth is getting more and more exposure. Humans are getting better and better at sharing ideas and information about what’s really happening in our world.
We just need to open our eyes. We just need to let truth get a word in edgewise. That’s all that needs to happen.
We need to stop fixating on all these made up stories in our heads and on our screens, and look deeply at what’s really going on.
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Tonight’s musical offering:
Dispatches from the Asylum 